Indigenous Memory and Nature Interact: Native Californian Stories

Location: Osher Theater, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)

Greg Sarris, Tribal Chairman, Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (Coast Miwok) and Author

In conversation with Beth Piatote, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English, UC Berkeley; Director, Arts Research Center

Indigenous leader and author Greg Sarris will join Assoc. Prof. of Comparative Literature and English Beth Piatote to discuss how literature and nature intersect with stories of Bay Area Native American history. Sarris will share insights from his memoir Becoming Story, which explores Coast Miwok culture. Centering Native lands, such as Angel Island (Coast Miwok territory) can frame a dialogue about Native American resistance and persistence in the face of settler colonialism and global migration. 

This talk is the first in a year-long project called A Year on Angel Island devoted to thinking about migration, exclusion and resistance by focusing on the Angel Island Immigration Station. This was a place designed to exclude as well as to process hundreds of thousands of  immigrants from more than 80 countries, mostly from Asia.  At the start of this project, we thought it important to begin with the stories of the original inhabitants of Angel Island, the Coast Miwok people. Their territory included Angel Island long before San Francisco Bay was a magnet for people around the world. 

We have asked Chairman Sarris to talk about the landscapes of his people, the Coast Miwok, and his own journeys as a writer. This will be a conversation between two esteemed writers: Sarris is an author and educator as well as the elected Chairman of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria and Professor Piatote is a poet, fiction writer, and playwright as well as a scholar.

A Year on Angel Island  uses Angel Island as an observatory from which to view landscapes of migration, incarceration and resistance.  A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts and Design. 

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Greg Sarris is Tribal Chairman of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria and author of books and plays including Becoming Story, Watermelon Nights, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts, Mission Indians, and How a Mountain was Made. Sarris’ collection of short stories, Grand Avenue, was adapted for an HBO miniseries of the same name, co-executive produced by Robert Redford. Sarris also co-produced, advised, and was featured in a sixteen part series on American literature for public television called American Passages. A Native of Santa Rosa, CA, Sarris graduated summa cum laude from UCLA and has a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He has been a full professor of English at UCLA; Fletcher Jones Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University; and currently holds the Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair in Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University.

Beth Piatote is a creative writer, playwright, and scholar. She is the author of two books, including the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction. Her full-length play, Antikoni, was selected for the 2020 Festival of New Plays by Native Voices at theAutry, and has been supported by readings with New York Classical Theatre and the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her short play, Tricksters, Unite! Was featured in the 2022 Native Voices Short Play Festival at the Autry and the LaJolla Playhouse. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Epiphany, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She is currently completing a poetry collection, Nez Perce Word for Shark; and a novel. She is an Indigenous language activist and a founding member of luk’upsíimey/North Star Collective, a group dedicated to using creative expression for Nez Perce language revitalization. She is one of the co-creators and current Chair of the DesignatedEmphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization at Berkeley. Her current scholarly projects include articles on Indigenous language revitalization, with a focus on Nez Perce literature and language; and a book manuscript on Indigenous literature, law, and the senses. She is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and English and the Director of the Arts Research Center. She is Nez Perce, enrolled with Colville Confederated Tribes.

Free and in-person; see COVID safety protocols here.

The event will also be live-streamed via Zoom webinar. To attend online, register for the webinar here.

Video of this talk will be posted about one week after the event.